These are my (Robin's) personal files for the Surge XT software synthesizer. On Windows in 2024, the content of this repo needs to locally reside in:
C:\Users\UserName\Documents\Surge XT
for Surge to able to use it. That means, to make use of that data, one needs to clone the repo to a local folder and then rename the folder from "SurgeSynth-RobsUserData" to "Surge XT" and move it into:
C:\Users\UserName\Documents\
But of course, anyone who has Surge installed will already have their own user data folder in that place. So in reality, unless you are me (which you aren't because I am already me), you will probably want to somehow combine your own user data with the data from this repo - most likely by just copying some subfolders of the "Patches" folder into your own
C:\Users\YourUserName\Documents\Surge XT\Patches
folder.
I myself need to set up GitHub Desktop in such a way that
C:\Users\MyUserName\Documents\Surge XT
becomes the local copy of the
https://github.com/RobinSchmidt/SurgeSynth-RobsUserData
repository. This can be done as follows: After a fresh install of Surge, there will be the default
C:\Users\MyUserName\Documents\Surge XT
and yet empty directory that was created by the Surge installer. That directory needs to be deleted (or maybe renamed, just in case one want to go back to the default content). Then open the GitHub Desktop application and go to:
File -> Clone Repository
then go to the URL tab and paste:
https://github.com/RobinSchmidt/SurgeSynth-RobsUserData
into the "URL" field and edit the "Local Path" field to
C:\Users\rob\Documents\Surge XT
where I have replaced the "MyUserName" placeholder with my actual user name on that machine which is "rob" and then click the "Clone" button. After the cloning is finished, the Surge XT folder should be in its right place and at the same time serve as the local copy of the repo. When TortoiseGit is installed, the folder should have a green check/hook in the Windows Explorer and it will be possible to commit and push the updates via GitHub Desktop.
Notes:
The MarkDown renderer on GitHub messes up the path names when using things like "[UserName]" instead of "UserName". That's why I'm not using the common convention for indicating placeholder strings with square brackets here.
The file README.txt explains how this folder is supposed to be used by Surge. It was not written by me but rather created automatically by the Surge installer. I wrote the ReadMe.md which takes precedence over the .txt file on the GitHub website such that the .md file will be shown when navigating to the repo in a web browser - which is how I want it. The auto-generate .txt file from the Surge installer is just kept for reference but may actually be mostly ignored.